According to statistics, the number of people having weak eyes including the blind amounts to 350,000 in Japan. They live with difficulties and inconveniencies in daily life as a member of society, since most of information from the outside is obtained by visual recognition. To help such people, various studies on information technology (IT)-based support system have been making progress.
For example, Japanese Patent Non-Examined Publication No. 2001-350485 discloses a fixed-type wireless article identifying device for supporting such a handicapped person living alone. To be more specific, articles to be identified have a wireless tag that contains information on each article. When a tagged-article is brought close to the article identifying device, information on the article is provided as a voice. In recent years, there has been a growing demand for more convenient device-not only a fixed-type, but also a mobile device with a compact and lightweight structure.